Breaking Waves: Ocean News

There’s much more to do, but we should be encouraged by the progress we have made Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat. I had been dreading the treaty anniversary as an occasion to note that we have not done nearly enough, but in July I thought we might be able celebrate it. Because, on 23 July, the international court of justice handed down an epochal ruling that gives that treaty enforceable consequences it never had before. It declares that all nations have a legal obligation to act in response to the climate crisis, and, as Greenpeace International put it, “obligates states to regulate businesses on the harm caused by their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place. Significantly, the court found that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all climate obligations.” The Paris treaty was cited repeatedly as groundwork for this decision. Continue reading...

Still rare only 20 years ago, the charismatic animals are in almost every UK river and a conservation success story On a quiet Friday evening, an otter and a fox trot through Lincoln city centre. The pair scurry past charity shops and through deserted streets, the encounter lit by the security lamps of shuttered takeaways. Each animal inspects the nooks and crannies of the high street before disappearing into the night, ending the unlikely scene captured by CCTV last month. Unlike the fox, the otter has been a rare visitor in towns and cities across the UK. But after decades of intense conservation work, that is changing. In the past year alone, the aquatic mammal has been spotted on a river-boat dock in London’s Canary Wharf, dragging an enormous fish along a riverbank in Stratford-upon-Avon, and plundering garden ponds near York. One otter was even filmed causing chaos in a Shetland family’s kitchen in March. Continue reading...

Fossils from Qatar have revealed a small, newly identified sea cow species that lived in the Arabian Gulf more than 20 million years ago. The site contains the densest known collection of fossil sea cow bones, showing that these animals once thrived in rich seagrass meadows. Their ecological role mirrors that of modern dugongs, which still reshape the Gulf’s seafloor as they graze. The findings may help researchers understand how seagrass ecosystems respond to long-term environmental change.

Exclusive: John Fingleton says regulators need to change their attitude to risk to end the country’s economic stagnation Overbearing health and safety rules are stopping Britain building new infrastructure, according to the economist whom Keir Starmer has cited as an inspiration for his growth strategy. John Fingleton, who recently wrote a report for government on how to encourage developers to build new nuclear power plants, told the Guardian regulators needed to change their attitude to risk if the country was to end its long economic stagnation. Continue reading...